Skip to Main Content

How to Use the Library

NEW! Learn how to navigate the Gellert Library's resources

Banned and Challenged Books

Gender Queer: A Memoir

Gender Queer: A Memoir

The #1 most-challenged book of 2023. Maia’s intensely cathartic autobiography charts eir journey of self-identity, which includes the mortification and confusion of adolescent crushes, grappling with how to come out to family and society, bonding with friends over erotic gay fanfiction, and facing the trauma and fundamental violation of pap smears

All Boys Aren't Blue

All Boys Aren't Blue

The #2 most-challenged book of 2023. In a series of personal essays, prominent journalist and LGBTQIA+ activist George M. Johnson explores his childhood, adolescence, and college years in New Jersey and Virginia. From the memories of getting his teeth kicked out by bullies at age five, to flea marketing with his loving grandmother, to his first sexual relationships, this young-adult memoir weaves together the trials and triumphs faced by Black queer boys.

This Book is Gay

This Book is Gay

The #3 most-challenged book of 2023. Inside you’ll find the answers to all the questions you ever wanted to ask: from sex to politics, hooking up to stereotypes, coming out and more. This candid and uncensored exploration of sexuality and what it’s like to grow up LGBT also includes real stories from people across the gender and sexual spectrums.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower

The Perks of Being a Wallflower

The #4 most-challenged book of 2023. A coming of age novel about Charlie, a freshman in high school who is a wallflower, shy and introspective, and very intelligent. He deals with the usual teen problems, but also with the suicide of his best friend. 

Flamer

Flamer

The #5 most-challenged book of 2023. It’s the summer between middle school and high school, and Aiden Navarro is away at camp. Everyone’s going through changes–but for Aiden, the stakes feel higher. As he navigates friendships, deals with bullies, and spends time with Elias (a boy he can’t stop thinking about), he finds himself on a path of self-discovery and acceptance.

Pride: The Story of Harvey Milk and the Rainbow Flag

Pride: The Story of Harvey Milk and the Rainbow Flag

A tie for the #1 most-challenged picture book of 2022. Traces the life of the Gay Pride Flag, from its beginnings with social activist Harvey Milk and designer Gilbert Baker to its spanning of the globe and its role in today’s world.

And Tango Makes Three

And Tango Makes Three

A tie for the #1 most-challenged picture book of 2022. Two penguins fall in love and start a family by taking turns sitting on an abandoned egg until it hatches. 

Voices from History

Creating a Place For Ourselves: Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Community Histories

Creating a Place For Ourselves: Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Community Histories

Creating a Place For Ourselves is a groundbreaking collection of essays that examines gay life in the United States before Stonewall and the gay  liberation movement. Along with examining areas with large gay communities such as New York, San Francisco and Fire Island, the contributors also consider the thriving gay populations in cities like Detroit, Buffalo, Washington, D.C., Birmingham and Flint

Before AIDS: Gay Health Politics in the 1970s

Before AIDS: Gay Health Politics in the 1970s

Before AIDS chronicles the development of gay health services in the 1970s as gay men faced public health challenges stemming from both their political marginalization and disease. Activists using tools and tactics from across their era's political landscape built a nationwide gay medical system, changing ideas about sexuality and health.

Letters to One: Gay and Lesbian Voices from the 1950s and 1960s

Letters to One: Gay and Lesbian Voices from the 1950s and 1960s

This book gathers letters, some previously unpublished, written to One Magazine, the first openly gay magazine in the U.S. The letters candidly explore issues such as police harassment of gay and lesbian communities, antigay job purges, and the philosophical, scientific, and religious meanings of homosexuality.

We've Been Here All Along: Wisconsin's Early Gay History

We've Been Here All Along: Wisconsin's Early Gay History

We've Been Here All Along provides an illuminating and nuanced picture of Wisconsin's gay history from the reporting on the Oscar Wilde trials of 1895 to the landmark Stonewall Riots of 1969.

Living Queer History: Remembrance and Belonging in a Southern City

Living Queer History: Remembrance and Belonging in a Southern City

Living Queer History tells the story of an LGBTQ community in Roanoke, Virginia, a small city on the edge of Appalachia by interweaving historical analysis, theory, and memoir.

Global Voices

Queer Ricans: Cultures and Sexualities in the Diaspora

Queer Ricans: Cultures and Sexualities in the Diaspora

Exploring cultural expressions of Puerto Rican queer migration from the Caribbean to New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, and San Francisco, Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes analyzes how artists have portrayed their lives and the discrimination they have faced. 

Queer City: Gay London from the Romans to the Present Day

Queer City: Gay London from the Romans to the Present Day

In Queer City, preeminent London scholar Peter Ackroyd looks at the metropolis in a whole new way: through the history and experiences of its gay population.

Tortilleras Negotiating Intimacy: Love, Friendship, and Sex in Queer Mexico City

Tortilleras Negotiating Intimacy: Love, Friendship, and Sex in Queer Mexico City

This is the first ethnography in English to focus primarily on women's sexual and intimate cultures in Mexico. Tortilleras Negotiating Intimacy shows how lesbian women (mainly cis, but some trans) negotiate friendship, same-sex marriage, polyamory, and sexual practices, reinventing love, eroticism, friendship, and ultimately the social organization of Latin American societies

Representing Queer and Transgender Identity: Fluid Bodies in the Hispanic Caribbean and Beyond

Representing Queer and Transgender Identity: Fluid Bodies in the Hispanic Caribbean and Beyond

Fluid Bodies traces the intersections of global movement with transgender and queer identities from authors and artists of the Hispanic Caribbean. Utilizing the theme of fluidity and travel, Fluid Bodies analyzes novels, graphic novels, theatre, and performance art. 

Queer Maghrebi French: Language, Temporalities, Transfiliations

Queer Maghrebi French: Language, Temporalities, Transfiliations

By closely examining empirical evidence from the lived experiences of queer Maghrebi French-speakers, this book presents a variety of paths available to these men who articulate and pioneer their own sexual difference within their families of origin and contemporary French society.

 South Africa and the Dream of Love to Come: Queer Sexuality and the Struggle for Freedom

South Africa and the Dream of Love to Come: Queer Sexuality and the Struggle for Freedom

After apartheid, South Africa established a celebrated new political order that imagined the postcolonial nation as belonging equally to the descendents of Indigenous people, colonizing settlers, transported slaves, indentured laborers, and immigrants. Its constitution, adopted in 1996, was the first in the world to include gays and lesbians as full citizens.

Queer Singapore: Illiberal Citizenship and Mediated Cultures

Queer Singapore: Illiberal Citizenship and Mediated Cultures

Singapore remains one of the few countries in Asia that has yet to decriminalise homosexuality. Yet it has also been hailed by many as one of the emerging gay capitals of Asia. This book accounts for the rise of mediated queer cultures in Singapore's current milieu.

The Poetics of Difference: Queer Feminist Forms in the African Diaspora

The Poetics of Difference: Queer Feminist Forms in the African Diaspora

This project explores the social and political resonances of African Diaspora women artists' experimental and formally subversive works. Reading these artists' works through a black queer feminist frame attentive to queerness shows that these artists use subversive poetics to contest dominant models of sexuality, gender, and political subjectivity in the African Diaspora.

Psychology

Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Ageing: Biographical Approaches for Inclusive Care and Support

Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Ageing: Biographical Approaches for Inclusive Care and Support

This book demonstrates how biographical approaches can increase understanding about the distinct perspectives of older LGBT people, enhancing inclusive care and support. Chapters explore people's expectations and fears surrounding care and service provision, the impact of discrimination, and specific issues such as HIV, dementia and end-of-life care.

Black LGBT Health in the United States: The Intersection of Race, Gender, and Sexual Orientation

Black LGBT Health in the United States: The Intersection of Race, Gender, and Sexual Orientation

This edited collection focuses on the mental, physical, and spiritual aspects of health, and considers both risk and resiliency factors for the Black LGBT population. Contributors to this collection intimately understand the associations between health and intersectional anti-Black racism, heterosexism, homonegativity, biphobia, transphobia, and social class.

A Clinician's Guide to Gender-affirming Care: Working with Transgender and Gender-nonconforming Clients

A Clinician's Guide to Gender-affirming Care: Working with Transgender and Gender-nonconforming Clients

Transgender and gender-nonconforming (TGNC) clients each require unique treatment methods that address who they are in relation to the world. This comprehensive guide outlines the latest research and recommendations to provide you with the requisite knowledge, skills, and awareness to treat TGNC clients with competent and affirming

Working with Trans Survivors of Sexual Violence: A Guide for Professionals

Working with Trans Survivors of Sexual Violence: A Guide for Professionals

This book provides practical advice for professionals working with transgender (including non-binary) people who have survived any form of sexual violence or abuse. It gives professionals an understanding of the impact and trauma of sexual violence on trans people, as well as the additional difficulties they face accessing services that have traditionally been designed to serve cisgendered clients. 

The Straight Line: How the Fringe Science of Ex-gay Therapy Reoriented Sexuality

The Straight Line: How the Fringe Science of Ex-gay Therapy Reoriented Sexuality

Intervening in the politics of sexuality and science, The Straight Line argues that scientific definitions of sexual orientation do not merely reflect the results of investigations into human nature, but rather emerge through a process of social negotiation between opposing groups.

Pocket Guide to LGBTQ Mental Health

The Pocket Guide to LGBTQ Mental Health is a down-to-earth, informative, and affirming manual for mental health clinicians working with patients of diverse gender and sexual identities.

Education

And They Were Wonderful Teachers : Florida's Purge of Gay and Lesbian Teachers

And They Were Wonderful Teachers : Florida's Purge of Gay and Lesbian Teachers

Focusing on Florida's purge of gay and lesbian teachers from 1956 to 1965, this study explores how the Florida Legislative Investigation Committee, commonly known as the Johns Committee, investigated and discharged dozens of teachers on the basis of sexuality. 

School's Out: Gay and Lesbian Teachers in the Classroom

School's Out: Gay and Lesbian Teachers in the Classroom

Using rich interview and ethnographic materials from Texas and California, School's Out explores how teachers struggle to create a classroom persona that balances who they are and what's expected of them in a climate of pervasive homophobia.

Teaching, Affirming, and Recognizing Trans* and Gender Creative Youth: A Queer Literacy Framework

Teaching, Affirming, and Recognizing Trans* and Gender Creative Youth: A Queer Literacy Framework

This book draws upon a queer literacy framework to map out examples for teaching literacy across pre-K-12 schooling. 

The Routledge International Handbook of Gender Beliefs, Stereotype Threat, and Teacher Expectations

The Routledge International Handbook of Gender Beliefs, Stereotype Threat, and Teacher Expectations

The collection summarises how gender beliefs, stereotype threat, and teacher expectations act in association to influence gendered student achievement, engagement, and self-beliefs, and suggests ways toward rectifying their negative effects.

LGBTQ Leadership in Higher Education

LGBTQ Leadership in Higher Education

Fifteen currently serving or retired LGBTQ presidents and chancellors in higher education consider whether there is something distinctive about LGBTQ leadership and attempt to draw insights and principles from their specific lived experiences.

Giving a Voice to the Voiceless

Giving a Voice to the Voiceless: A Qualitative Study of Reducing Marginalization of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Same-sex Attracted Students at Christian colleges and Universities

This project addresses the sense of marginalization experienced by lesbian, gay, bisexual (LGB) and same-sex attracted (SSA) Christian college and university students. 

LGBTQ Issues in Education: Advancing a Research Agenda

LGBTQ Issues in Education: Advancing a Research Agenda

This edited collection examines the current state of the knowledge on LGBTQ issues in education and addresses future research directions. The editor and authors draw on existing literature, theories, and data as they synthesize key areas of research. 

Business

Buying Gay: How Physique Entrepreneurs Sparked a Movement

Buying Gay: How Physique Entrepreneurs Sparked a Movement

David K. Johnson tells the story of the physique magazine produced by and for gay men to show how gay commerce was not a byproduct of the gay rights movement but an important catalyst for it. 

Plane Queer: Labor, Sexuality, and AIDS in the History of Male Flight Attendants

Plane Queer: Labor, Sexuality, and AIDS in the History of Male Flight Attendants

Plane Queer examines the history of men who joined workplaces customarily identified as female-oriented. It examines the various hardships these men faced at work, paying particular attention to the conflation of gender-based, sexuality-based, and AIDS-based discrimination.

Towards Queering the Business School

Towards Queering the Business School: A Research Agenda for Advancing Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Trans Perspectives and Issues

This article draws on queer theory to advance a research agenda that foregrounds lesbian, gay, bi and trans (LGBT) perspectives and issues as one means by which business schools can be made queer(er) institutions to work. 

Out in the Union: A Labor History of Queer America

Out in the Union: A Labor History of Queer America

Out in the Union tells the continuous story of queer American workers from the mid-1960s through 2013. It chronicles the evolution of labor politics with queer activism and identity formation, showing how unions began affirming the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender workers in the 1970s and 1980s. 

Antigay Bias in Role-model Occupations

Antigay Bias in Role-model Occupations

Combining the stories of LGBT trailblazers with analysis of historical data, anecdotal evidence, research, and literature, Antigay Bias in Role-Model Occupations is the first book to explore in a comprehensive fashion the broad effects of sexual orientation discrimination in role-model occupations well beyond its individual victims.

Creating Inclusive Co-Op Workplaces: Insights from LGBTQ+ Students

Creating Inclusive Co-Op Workplaces: Insights from LGBTQ+ Students

The purpose of this grounded theory study was to explore the notion of inclusion from the perspective of LGBTQ+ co-op students in the context of their work term experiences, including searching for work and during the work term

Changing Corporate America from Inside Out: Lesbian and Gay Workplace Rights

Changing Corporate America from Inside Out: Lesbian and Gay Workplace Rights

This analysis focuses on the mobilization of lesbian, gay, and bisexual employee networks at the turn of the millennium to win domestic partner benefits in Fortune 1000 companies. 

Straight Jobs, Gay Lives

Straight Jobs, Gay Lives: Gay and Lesbian Professionals, the Harvard Business School, and the American Workplace

Straight Jobs, Gay Lives includes hundreds of personal stories of men and women of all ages and races at all career stages to provide an exhaustive, comprehensive, and readable guide to being gay and succeeding in the American workplace